The midlife crisis, what I’ll call, “success panic” isn’t about aging. It’s about waking up and realizing you’ve been playing a character in someone else’s story.

An entire generation is discovering they spent decades chasing goals that were handed to them. The right title. The impressive salary. The house that signals you made it. All optimized for a scorecard they never agreed to keep.

The panic isn’t “what’s next?” It’s “did I ever choose this?”

If people understood their work has intrinsic worth, not because it buys things or impresses others, but because it contributes something real, would the collapse happen at all?

We’ve constructed a value system where effort only matters if it leads somewhere else. Your time for their money. Your energy for their approval. When you finally get what you were promised and it turns out to be weightless, everything gives way.

The midlife reckoning is the cost of spending your youth accumulating things you were conditioned to want rather than building something you actually believe in.

The answer isn’t better planning for the second half. It’s asking better questions in the first: Who decided what success looks like? Why am I letting them keep score? And what would I build if I stopped playing their game entirely?